Saturday (16 page)

 

The white plastic bag that holds the family dinner is heavy, dense with flesh and sodden paper, and the handles bite into his palm as he walks back to his car. Because of the pain in his chest, he isn't able to transfer the load to his left hand. Coming away from the dank seaweed odours of the fishmonger's, he thinks he can taste sweetness in the air, like warm hay drying in the fields in August. The smell – surely an illusion generated by contrast – persists, even with the traffic and the February chill. All those family summers at his father-in-law's place in the Ariège, in a south-west corner of France where the land begins to ripple and swell before the Pyrenees. The Chateau St Felix of warm, faintly pink stone, and two rounded towers and the fragment of a moat was where John Grammaticus retreated when his wife died, and where he mourned her with the famous sad-sweet love songs collected up in the volume called
No Exequies
. Not famous to Henry Perowne, who read no poetry in adult life even after he acquired a poet father-in-law. Of course, he
began as soon as he discovered he'd fathered a poet himself. But it cost him an effort of an unaccustomed sort. Even a first line can produce a tightness behind his eyes. Novels and movies, being restlessly modern, propel you forwards or backwards through time, through days, years or even generations. But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill like drystone walling or trout tickling.

When Grammaticus came out of mourning, more than twenty years ago, he began a series of love affairs that still continues. The pattern is well established. A younger woman, usually English, sometimes French, is taken on as secretary and housekeeper, and by degrees becomes a kind of wife. After two or three years she'll walk out, unable to bear any more, and it will be her replacement who greets the Perowne family in late July. Rosalind is scathing at each turnaround, always preferring the last to the next, then, over time, developing a fondness. After all, it's hardly the new arrival's fault. The children, entirely without judgment, even as teenagers, are immediately kind to her. Perowne, constitutionally bound to love one woman all his life, has been quietly impressed, especially as the old man advances into his seventies. Perhaps he's slowing down at last, for Teresa, a jolly forty-year-old librarian from Brighton, has been with him almost four years.

The dinners outside in the interminable dusk, the scented wheels of hay in the small steep fields that surround the gardens, and the fainter smell of swimming-pool chlorine on the children's skin, and warm red wine from Cahors or Cabrières, – it should be paradise. It almost is, which is why they continue to visit. But John can be a childish, domineering man, the sort of artist who grants himself the licence of a full-spectrum mood swing. He can migrate in the space of a bottle of red wine from twinkly anecdotes to sudden eruption, then a huffy retreat to his study – that tall stooping back receding
across the lawn in the gloom towards the lighted house, with Betty or Jane or Francine, and now Teresa following him in to smooth things out. He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat. The years and the drink are not softening him. And naturally, as he ages and writes less, he's become unhappier. His exile in France has been a prolonged sulk, darkened over two decades by various slights from the home country. There was a bad four-year patch when his
Collected Poems
was out of print and another publisher had to be found. John minded when Spender and not he was knighted, when Raine not Grammaticus got the editorship at Faber, when he lost the Oxford Professorship of Poetry to Fenton, when Hughes and later Motion were preferred as Poets Laureate, and above all when it was Heaney who got the Nobel. These names mean nothing to Perowne. But he understands how eminent poets, like senior consultants, live in a watchful, jealous world in which reputations are edgily tended and a man can be brought low by status anxiety. Poets, or at least this poet, are as earthbound as the rest.

For a couple of summers when the children were babies the Perownes went elsewhere, but they found nothing in southern Europe as beautiful as St Felix. It was where Rosalind spent her childhood holidays. The chateau was enormous and it was easy to keep out of John's way – he liked to spend several hours a day alone. There were rarely more than two or three bad moments in a week, and with time they've mattered less. And as the pattern of his love life became established, Rosalind has had her own delicate reasons to keep close contact with her father. The chateau belonged to her maternal grandparents and was the love of her mother's life. She was the one who modernised and restored the place. The worry is that if age and illness wear John down into finally marrying one of his secretaries, the chateau could pass out of the family into the hands of a newcomer. French inheritance
laws might have prevented that, but there's a document, an old tontine, to show that St Felix has been exempted and that English law prevails. In his irritable way, John has assured his daughter he'll never remarry and that the chateau will be hers, but he refuses to put anything in writing.

That background anxiety will probably be resolved. Another more forceful reason why they've kept up their summer visits to the chateau is because Daisy and Theo used to insist – those were the old days, before John and Daisy fell out. They loved their grandfather and considered his silly moods proof of his difference, his greatness – a view he rather shared himself. He doted on them, never raised his voice against them, and hid from them his worst outbursts. From the beginning, he considered himself – rightly as it's turned out – a figure in their intellectual development. Once it became clear that Theo was never going to take more than a polite interest in books, John encouraged him at the piano and taught him a simple boogie in C. Then he bought him an acoustic guitar and lugged up from the cellars cardboard boxes of blues recordings on heavy old 78s as well as LPs, and made tapes which arrived in London in regular packages. On Theo's fourteenth birthday, his grandfather drove him to Toulouse to hear John Lee Hooker in one of his last appearances. One summer evening after dinner, Grammaticus and Theo performed ‘St James' Infirmary' under a brilliant sky of stars, the old man tipping back his head and warbling in a husky American accent that made Rosalind tearful. Theo, still only fourteen, improvised a sweet and melancholy solo. Perowne, sitting apart with his wine by the pool, bare feet in the water, was touched too and blamed himself for not taking his son's talent seriously enough.

That autumn Theo began travelling to east London for lessons with various elderly figures of the British blues scene, contacted through a friend of Rosalind's at her paper. According to Theo, Jack Bruce was the most impressive because he had formal training in music, played several
instruments, revolutionised bass playing, knew everything about theory and recorded with everyone during the heroic period of the British blues, in the early sixties, the long-ago days of Blues Incorporated. He was also, Theo said, more patient with him than the others, and very kind. Perowne was surprised how an elevated figure like Bruce could be troubled to spend time instructing a mere boy. Disarmingly, Theo saw nothing unusual in it at all.

Through Bruce, Theo met some of the legendary figures. He was allowed to sit in on a Clapton masterclass. Long John Baldry came over from Canada for a reunion. Theo liked hearing about Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner, and the Graham Bond Organisation, and Cream's first concert. By some accident Theo jammed for several minutes with Ronnie Wood and met his older brother, Art. A year on, Art asked Theo to join a jamming session at the Eel Pie Club in the Cabbage Patch pub in Twickenham. In less than five years he seems to have possessed the whole tradition. Now, whenever he's at the chateau he plays for his grandfather and shows him his latest tricks. He seems to need John's approval, and the old man obliges. Perowne has to hand it to him, he opened up something in Theo that he, Perowne, might never have known about. It's true that on a body-surfing holiday in Pembrokeshire when Theo was nine, Henry showed him three simple chords on someone's guitar and how the blues worked in E. That was just one thing along with the frisbee throwing, grass skiing, quad biking, paintballing, stone skipping and in-line skating. He worked seriously on his children's fun back then. He even broke an arm keeping up on the skates. But he never could have guessed those three chords would become the basis of his son's professional life.

John Grammaticus has also been a force in Daisy's life, at least, until something went wrong between them. When she was thirteen, about the time he was teaching her brother the boogie in C, he asked her to tell him about the books she enjoyed. He heard her out and announced she was under-
stretched – he was contemptuous of the ‘young adult' fiction she was reading. He persuaded her to try
Jane Eyre
, and read the first chapters aloud to her, and mapped out for her the pleasures to come. She persisted, but only to please him. The language was unfamiliar, the sentences long, the pictures in her head, she kept saying, wouldn't come clear. Perowne tried the book and had much the same experience. But John kept his granddaughter at it, and finally, a hundred pages in, she fell for Jane and would hardly stop for meals. When the family went for a walk across the fields one afternoon, they left her with forty-one pages to go. When they returned they found her under a tree by the dovecote weeping, not for the story but because she had reached the end and emerged from a dream to grasp that it was all the creation of a woman she would never meet. She cried, she said, out of admiration, out of joy that such things could be made up. What sort of things, Grammaticus wanted to know. Oh Grandad, when the orphanage children die and yet the weather is so beautiful, and that bit when Rochester pretends to be a gypsy, and when Jane meets Bertha for the first time and she's like a wild animal…

He gave her Kafka's ‘Metamorphosis', which he said was ideal for a thirteen-year-old girl. She raced through this domestic fairy story and demanded her parents read it too. She came into their bedroom in the chateau far too early one morning and sat on the bed to lament: that poor Gregor Samsa, his family are so
horrid
to him. How lucky he was to have a sister to clean out his room and find him the foods he liked. Rosalind took it in at a gulp, as though it were a legal brief. Perowne, by nature ill-disposed towards a tale of impossible transformation, conceded that by the end he was intrigued – he wouldn't have put it higher than that. He liked the unthinking cruelty of that sister on the final page, riding the tram with her parents to the last stop, stretching her young limbs, ready to begin a sensual life. A transformation he could believe in. This was the first book Daisy recommended
to him, and marked the beginning of his literary education at her hands. Though he's been diligent over the years and tries to read almost everything she puts his way, he knows she thinks he's a coarse, unredeemable materialist. She thinks he lacks an imagination. Perhaps it's so, but she hasn't quite given up on him yet. The books are piled at his bedside, and she'll be arriving with more tonight. He hasn't even finished the Darwin biography, or started the Conrad.

From the summer of Brontë and Kafka onwards, Grammaticus took charge of Daisy's reading. He had firm, old-fashioned views of the fundamentals, not all of which he thought should be too pleasurable. He believed in children learning by rote, and he was prepared to pay up. Shakespeare, Milton and the King James Bible – five pounds for every twenty lines memorised from the passages he marked. These three were the sources of all good English verse and prose; he instructed her to roll the syllables around her tongue and feel their rhythmic power. The summer of her sixteenth birthday, Daisy earned a teenage fortune at the chateau, chanting, even singing, parts of
Paradise Lost
, and Genesis and various gloomy musings of Hamlet. She recited Browning, Clough, Chesterton and Masefield. In one good week she earned forty-five pounds. Even now, six years on, at the age of twenty-three, she claims to be able to spout – her word – non-stop for more than two hours. By the time she was eighteen and leaving school she'd read a decent fraction of what her grandfather called the obvious stuff. He wouldn't hear of her going anywhere to study English Literature other than his own Oxford college. Though Henry and Rosalind begged him not to, he probably put in a good word for her. Dismissively, he told them that these days the system was incorruptible and he couldn't help even if he wanted to. Familiarity with their own professions told them this could never be strictly true. But it soothed their consciences, the handwritten note to Daisy's headmaster from a tutor which said she'd given a dazzling interview, backing every insight with a quotation.

A year later she may have had a little too much success for her grandfather's taste. She arrived at St Felix two days after the rest of the family, and brought with her the poem that had won her that year's Newdigate Prize. Henry and Rosalind had never heard of the Newdigate, but were automatically pleased. But it meant more, perhaps too much, to Daisy's grandfather who had won it himself back in the late fifties. He took her pages into his study – her parents were only allowed to see them later. The poem described at length the tender meditations of a young woman at the end of another affair. Once more she has stripped the sheets from her bed and taken them to the launderette where she watches through the ‘misted monocle' of the washing machine, ‘all stains of us turning to be purged'. These affairs also turned, like the seasons, too quickly, ‘running green to brown' with ‘windfalls sweetly rotting to oblivion'. The stains are not really sins but ‘watermarks of ecstasy' or later ‘milky palimpsests', and therefore not so easily removed after all. Vaguely religious, mellifluously erotic, the poem suggested to a troubled Perowne that his daughter's first year at university had been more crowded than he could ever have guessed. Not just a boyfriend, or a lover, but a whole succession, to the point of serenity. This may have been why Grammaticus took against the poem – his protégée had struck out and found other men. Or it may have been one more pitiful attack of status anxiety – in forming Daisy's literary education he hadn't intended to produce yet another rival poet. This Newdigate after all had also been won by Fenton and Motion.